Today Avalai was more fussy I guess...or at least more moody because of her teething.
She's been fighting sleep lately, which is kind of crazy since she's yawning and rubbing her eyes all the time.
I picked her up at about 4:45 and took her with me to pick up Kim and run some errands and pick up bogo free Quizno's. I reminded her of who Kim is...(they've met before several times) and she quickly was saying "Hi Tim" ...We'll have to work on the "k" :)
When we dropped Kim off at her house, she invited us in to see their renovations...and Avalai quickly spotted her cat "Snickers". Oh that poor cat was not thrilled at the attention he was getting from Avalai. She was yelling "cat, cat, cat!" and meowing as she chased the poor thing around the house. He tried to hide under the table...she climbed right under there after him. Trying to pet his tail and then putting her face right up to his...he would eventually growl and run off as she said "Oh no!" and chased back after him.

...I'm coming back to this one and editing, because as I was typing last night, Avalai woke up screaming...and I rushed up to see if she was ok...(she sometimes pokes her foot in between the rails and then when she rolls over...it gets stuck, and she squeals...) and she was sitting up screaming with a nightmare or her teething I guess. So...I'm not usually able to snuggle with her, so...I took the opportunity...and capitalized on her grogginess...and we snuggled as I rubbed her head and she played with my hair until she fell back asleep. That only works when she's half asleep :) But it was precious. Worth not getting the rest of my work done for. :)

Ok...one more thing I wanted to mention on this post...for the longest time we wouldn't let Avalai do stairs by herself, and we ferociously kept her from the tops of staircases. She just didn't easily grasp the concept that it went down, and she would fall. She would just walk up to stairs and nearly keep walking as if there were an invisible flat floor there for her to walk onto. Thankfully this became apparent to us when she was atop single step-downs on a couple of occasions. So we caught her and it would have only been a one-step fall. But that got me paranoid that she would treat steep staircases the same way. So, although Mom taught her how to climb up stairs when she was 14 months, and we would let her climb up them ONLY if we were following directly behind her as she went, we ALWAYS carried her down any stairs until she was about 19 months.
I finally decided that we should probably teach her a safer way to go down stairs...mainly to protect her if she somehow got away from us and faced that situation. Soooo we several times showed her how to sit down, and go down one step at a time while she was seated. She loved the idea of course, and soon wanted to do it all the time. She'd run ahead of me, and I kept reminding her..."Sit, Sit! Wait for me!" well before she got to the edge of the stairs. She proved to be a good listener and always obeyed. And in a couple weeks, I could trust her to better handle it on her own. I still want her to wait for me and I go down first and back down to be sure she doesn't slide forward and flip on our slippery stairs...but...she knows the drill and is very faithful to drop down to a sitting position a couple yards from the stairs sometimes and then scoot down the hallway to the edge of the stairs.
Well...it's become normal at home since we have two staircases, but when we were heading out the front door at Kim's house...we were talking, and she opened the door slowly, when suddenly I hear "plop" and thought Avalai fell somehow...well, she had come around from behind me, and since she saw the single little half-step onto the front patio coming up...she had plopped down and was scooting her little bottom off that mini-step. As I was cracking up and trying to explain her actions to Kim...Avalai continues to scoot across the entire porch until she comes to the final single little half-step that dropped down just a bit to the front yard.
I was a little dismayed at the grunge I was sure that she had added to her outfit as she had scooted along the dirty stone patio, but it was just too funny to be upset. And she was doing exactly what I had taught her about steps. I was strangely proud of her obedience and recognition of the situation!